Welsh Incident

Story

Two strangers are in the middle of a conversation about a strange occurrence on the Welsh coast. One Easter Sunday, peculiar creatures emerged from the sea-caves of Criccieth, not dragons or ghosts or mermaids, but each unlike the next. The beings are almost impossible to describe. Ignoring the gathered masses of people and the mayor’s welcome, they slouch and slither, indifferent, towards the sea.

Why we chose it

A dramatic narrative poem in the form of a conversation.

Where it came from

Robert Graves (1895 – 1985) was an English poet, novelist, and classical scholar who served on the Western Front during the First World War. His experiences of war and his fraught personal life hugely influenced his poetry. ‘The Welsh Incident’ was initially published in Poems (1929) and entitled ‘The Railway Carriage.’ It is now better known by the name given to the version in Collected Poems (1975). Graves was born in London but spent his family holidays in Wales and claimed that he wrote the poem as a joke and in a Welsh accent. It was also inspired by a real occurrence, when the young Robert had been travelling with his father by train and overheard a Welsh policeman regaling everyone with the tale of a mermaid he had seen.

Where it went next

1929, the year this poem was first published, was a particularly turbulent one for Graves, as he left his wife and four children to live in Majorca with Laura Riding, an American poet. The significant success of his memoirs of the war, Goodbye to All That, which had also been published that year, facilitated this move. Over the course of his life, Graves became not only one of our most well-known war writers, but also acclaimed for his love poetry, novels, and classical criticism.

Associated stories

Graves wrote over 120 books over the course of his career. His Collected Poems was first published in 1948, with many subsequent revisions, and some of his most well-known poems include ‘1915’ and his ‘White Goddess’ poetry. Other than his war memoirs, his most commercially successful works were the historical ‘potboiler’ novel I, Claudius (1934) and its sequel Claudius the God (1935).